So GamesRadar released a little list of video game music they think is worth putting on your iPod. They said that they realize that everyone's taste in music is different, and I tend to agree! (After quickly realizing that their picks were quite atrocious.) So I'm going to make my own little list of music to say you should listen to! (I'm also going to forgo the whole subliminal advertising for Apple.) I'm going to take this opportunity to test out a little Flash music player that my friend Iaian7's been using for a while, too, but in case it doesn't show up, you can click the title of the track and get the MP3! (No OGG, AAC, WMA or any weird stuff here. MP3 forever.) These are all 30 second clips, to avoid any rampant lawsuit by the RIAA claiming to be representing the artists of these tracks.

10. Myst - Myst Theme
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I'm having a difficult time sorting these by priority, so I'm going to wing it. I'm not going to pick some arbitrary number and try to come up with enough to fill the list... I'm going to show you 10 of my favorite video game tracks, rated, more or less, from least important to most. Still, being the bottom of the top 10 is no crying matter, and I'm going to start off with a track that everyone who calls themselves a gamer should have heard by now. Anyone who regularly reads this blog will definitely know what it is. It's the Myst Theme, by good ol' Robyn Miller. It's been so long since it first reached my ears and I can still remember the pure awe and sense of mystery surrounding this game.

9. Super Mario 64 - Koopa's Road
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Similarly, anyone who calls themselves a gamer should know what this is by now. Koopa's Road, by Koji Kondo. I really have no experience to associate with this, because I was late on the Super Mario 64 scene, but there's just something about it that defines Bowser, and something that just feels right while you're trying to reach him through some otherworldly mess of gadgets and baddies built in the vast expanse of absolutely nothing.

8. Metroid Prime - Menu Select
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This is one thing we agreed on, though, GamesRadar and I. Except they picked the Main Title of Metroid Prime 2, and I picked the music that accompanies the menu in the first game. By both Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuma, according to my sources. This is the game that precedes all other Metroid games, says Nintendo. The story that started it all and a best-seller on that "failed" console, the Gamecube!

7. World of Warcraft - Legends of Azeroth
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I'll bet you didn't know that pounding music that plays during the log on screen had a title! Well, it does! Legends of Azeroth by... A whole heck of a lot of people: Jason Hayes, Tracy W. Bush, Derek Duke, and Glenn Stafford. I remember the first time I started up World of Warcraft. The dark swirling portal on the side opposite of Azeroth, looking through from a dead, desolate world to a lush, green paradise... A world that the Burning Legion wanted for their own, and a world wracked with war after war with so much story... A lot of history. More than most fantasy novels, even.

6. Myst Online: Uru - Gallery Theme
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My first intention was to only list tracks from games that weren't related to each other. One Mario, one Myst, and so forth. But I realized that my list really could not be complete without the Gallery Theme, by Tim Larkin. Kadish's Gallery. The token personification of the pride of D'ni. The pride before their fall. You remember the story behind it, right? That when Veovis and A'Gaeris were poisoning the entire civilization, Kadish's wife (who you can hear singing) was waiting for him at home, singing his favorite song from his favorite play. He never showed up to be with her in D'ni final hours. He was too busy dying, alone, surrounded by all his wealth that was locked away deep in his Age. They both died alone.

5. Chrono Trigger - Chrono Trigger
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How's that title for you? The track "Chrono Trigger" from the game Chrono Trigger, by Yasunori Mitsuda. Arguably the best role playing game of all time, with no exceptions in my book. Final Fantasy doesn't come close. Nothing does, and nothing ever will. Chrono Trigger is pure brilliance, with the best story and the best musical soundtrack you could have ever asked for on a Super Nintendo. (Incidentally, this clip I'm giving you is actually a special remix made for the Playstation release after Square sold out to Sony and abandoned Nintendo.)

4. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - The Goddess Appears
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Speaking of Nintendo! Here's a classic for you. The Goddess Appears, by Koji Kondo. You may recognize it as Great Fairy's Fountain and the menu music from the Ocarina of Time and... Well, I think pretty much every game since the first one. There's really not much to say here. It's Zelda. It's Fairy's Fountain. It's good, and it's had so many revisions it's not funny. I picked A Link to the Past because it was the only copy I had that wasn't actually a fan remix, but it's still so good!

3. Perfect Dark - Institute Menu
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This track has special meaning to me. My grandparents have a neighbor who we always hang out with when we visit, and he was one of the first on the block to snag a Nintendo 64. We could play Goldeneye 007 constantly! ...Until Perfect Dark came out. This marked my first real endeavor into all-night gaming! Fragging it up at 3am, freezing the console when we coordinated the detonation of all our remote trip mines at the same time. Awesome times. The entire soundtrack for this game is amazing. Not too heavy like nearly every other FPS, but enough to get you on the edge of your seat when the time comes!

2. Halo 2 - Unforgotten
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Of course, Marty O'Donnell took FPS soundtracks to an entirely new level with Halo, and then completely outdid himself with Halo 2. I don't have the Halo 3 soundtrack, and I don't think it's even been released, yet, so this is the next best thing. I believe (if I recall correctly) that the title insinuates that those who went above and beyond the call of duty in the Covenant War will never be forgotten, and boy... It sure does drive that feeling home, if you ask me.

1. Okami - Rising Sun
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This is the reason for my rule of "one track per game or game series", otherwise, I would have filled it up with Okami tracks and it would've bored you to death. However, Rising Sun, by Rei Kondoh, is the pinnacle of any music that I have ever heard from anywhere in my life. Usually, I'll listen to a track and remix it in my head, trying to make my own arrangement and see how I could make it sound better, maybe with different instruments or slower or what have you. Not Rising Sun. The more I listen, the more perfect it is, and the more I love it. I've listened to this so much before I even heard of Last.fm, so whatever count you see there? It's far, far, far greater than that. My all time favorite and I guarantee that you won't be disappointed with having this track on your MP3 player!

Here we go again...

I remember when Blizzard Warden first came out. Everyone went insane over the fact that Blizzard dare install a program that scans their system! After all, a program that scans your computer could pick up your credit card information, right? Let's ignore the fact that... It doesn't, didn't and won't. The mere thought of something capable of doing that is worth the freaking-out-itude. Especially when said scanners "call home". Ah, such a powerful phrase. Call home. Anyway, people freak out that Blizzard was listening to their complaints and developed a program that scans for cheatware and keyloggers. (Cheatware: applications used willingly by players to achieve an unearthly amount of automation in an effort to... well... cheat! Keylogger: applications unknowingly installed on your system by poking around in warez or by social engineering that monitors what you type in to your accounts!) Basically, Warden made sure you weren't cheating and made sure you weren't getting taken advantage of. Prevention and protection.

Guess what? It worked. Accounts are banned at an almost alarming rate with a very, very low rating of false positives. Warden works, that much is clear. Eventually, the whining died off. They either canceled their account or they got smart and figured out that less cheaters and spammers in the game was better than whining about what the scanning software COULD be used for, but wasn't. (Honestly, who stores their banking information in plain-text in the first place? Only idiots. There is not a single reason for you to have your credit card information in scannable form on your hard drive.) People whined about the polymorphist nature of Warden, but, uhm. Yeah. If the program didn't change, hackers would learn how to bypass it. So Blizzard changes it a lot to prevent that. It works. Yes, it's the nature of a virus, but it isn't a viral feature.

Well, now Blizzard has strengthened Warden once again. I'm not even sure what the huge deal is. The article just spouted complicated phrases like "random hash algorithms" without actually talking about what they were used for, so I'm going to decipher it as much as I can, based on the general resulting outcry.

Either Warden has been beefed up in its searching (I know it uses a list of known hashes to detect cheating and keylogging applications) or its own checksum has been changed so that it could essentially be impossible to determine if it's really Warden or not. I don't know, but whatever it is, Blizzard can change this algorithm at their will. Apparently, this is given rise to a new batch of whiners who claim that a "rogue Blizzard operative" could use Warden to "harvest bank information" without anyone knowing. (As if the majority of WoW subscribers haven't already given Blizzard their bank and contact information, haha.) Warden is known to scan your registry and active processes and compare what it finds to the hash database it has and then transmit anything it finds to Blizzard. The key here is that it doesn't transmit everything it finds, only the problems it thinks it's found.

I don't even clearly understand HOW or WHY this is a bad thing, but the post I linked to is convinced that this makes it impossible to tell if Warden has been compromised... by someone at Blizzard... who somehow had total unmonitored access to Warden's code... and managed to push the new, malicious Warden out to all 7 million subscribers... and have no other employees notice. Somehow. That's the idea they're going for. That's all they have. Let's forget the fact that Blizzard has not done this and is not doing this and has absolutely no compelling reason to do this in the future. But that 1 in a 1000000 chance is enough to make people go "OH MY GOSH IT'S THE END OF OUR PRIVACY AS WE KNOW IT."

Fine. If that's what you think it is, and you think the chance of an evil Blizzard employee stealing your credit card information (stored in plain text) from your computer and receiving it via Warden is an all too real danger? Stop playing World of Warcraft. It's actually quite simple. You can even tell them  WHY you quit. Just say "I quit because I think that Warden is compromising my privacy" and be done with it... Because out of the 10 loudly outspoken people who think this is an issue, there are 6,999,990 people who think Warden is perfectly safe and who think Warden is an essential tool in stopping cheaters and keyloggers and we LIKE IT. Some of us have played other MMOs before that didn't give a hoot about who was cheating. Blizzard cares enough to hunt out these lowlifes and it WORKS. If there were people being banned left and right for false positives, I think they wouldn't hesitate to scream about it. We might get one or two people banned for some weird circumstances, like the guy who macro'd all kinds of moves into a single keyboard key (cheating) or the guy emulating WoW in Linux and Warden wasn't operating correctly. I think 2 out of 7 million in the entire time since it's been released is pretty good odds.

So in the end, yes. We know Warden scans our systems. Thanks, we already know that. Yes, we know it reports anything bad it finds to Blizzard. Thanks, we already know that. Yes, we know that Warden could, in some unimaginable circumstance, be used to harvest personal information. Thanks, we already know that. If it's bothering you that much, feel free to uninstall WoW. If you're not willing to do that, please, for the love of all that is good in this world, STOP TELLING US WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW.

There's a game out there called Second Life. People will argue on and on for days and days on why it's NOT a game, or why it IS a game. But this is me talking, and I consider it a game, so a game it shall be called when I write about it. In this game (yes, I also enjoy saying it to annoy people who take it too seriously), people of all kinds connect to a massive user-operated game world. Basically, there's a big huge empty world, and people buy, with real life money, plots of land with which to build stuff. Anything you can imagine, you can build.

Anyway, there's some group of scientists out there trying to find out if people protect their "virtual privacy", and this is the job I want. I want to play a game, write a robot, and send it out after the people taking the game too seriously, and see how they react to a digital avatar walking up to their digital avatar, record the responses, and present the responses as valid research. That's the job I want. Heck, I'll even PLAY the game manually to see how the people react! You'll get faster results out of me, because I don't need complicated scripts!

Anyone who's actually played Second Life will tell you... Yes, people protect their "virtual privacy". Let me tell you a story... Actually, let me tell you a couple of stories!

Once upon a time, three avatars were exploring with a Stargate device that someone built and scripted. It would even randomly dial another gate, open a wormhole, you could walk through it and BAM! You're on the other side. Awesome way to kill the time. So these three avatars went through the Stargate and found themselves in a very large shop on an industrial coast. Slightly off the shop grounds, there were two other avatars making out in a little gazebo. I am being generous with the terms here... Such as, this "gazebo" was pretty much a blue sphere carved out in the middle. Not very creative. One of the Stargate travelers promptly put on a Goomba suit and sat on top of the two avatars making out. The two avatars got incredibly upset, verbally raked the Goomba suited avatar over the coals, and left.

There are a few points to make here. One is that land can be isolated. You can block people from visiting if you REALLY wanted your privacy. This land was public. The making out avatars had no control over this. Two is that Stargates have to be on publicly accessible properties. Check and check. The two avatars failed to take into consideration these things, and the fact that since it is a game, people will be silly and do what they can't bring themselves to do in real life. If you REALLY wanted your privacy, you'd go somewhere that didn't have a Stargate on it.

Let me tell you another story! Once upon a time, three avatars were exploring the Stargate network! They came across an island out in the middle of an ocean, with no signs of civilization besides the island itself. The island was densely populated by empty houses, so the avatars decided to explore. They examined the house from the outside and, deciding that it was empty, proceeded to explore the inside, because, after all, it was a game that you could explore places and things built by other people! The fact that the land was publicly accessible and had a Stargate means that you are free to come and go by the rules of the game. Inside this house, however, was a man. A very angry man. Without any words, he proceeded to shoot the three avatars with a weapon none had seen before! It would, simply, encase the avatar in a bubble and rocket them skyward, many, many, many kilometers into the air. Hey! That was kind of fun! So the avatars kept returning to get shot, and they got flung into the air, and returned, and got flung into the air, until suddenly... The three explorers were slapped with a rejection and were booted from the island and back to their home location. The person with the gun was the owner of the island, and he didn't want the avatars there at all.

There are a few points to make here. One is that the island in question was publicly accessible. Two is that the island in question had a Stargate on it. The builder and creator of the Second Life Stargate made a rule that all Stargates must be on publicly accessible land. The owner of the island failed to take into consideration these two things. It also brings up the question... Why have publicly accessible property and not want anyone looking at your handiwork? Are you building it to impress your online girlfriend? (Who could also just as easily be a man on the other end.) If so, lock the property! If not, expect people to explore. The avatars were able to return by setting foot on just a sliver of the island in question. The rest was blocked. From their vantage point, they could see that the Stargate had been removed from its resting place.

Yes, mister scientist robot building man, people protect their "virtual privacy", and I could have told you that for free, provided you mentioned me in that fancy article written about you. I could have told you that people who play Second Life take the game far too seriously and get uproariously upset when people invade their "virtual privacy". The very term "virtual privacy", in the sense of a populated game world, is like saying "I'm going to drink some evaporated water" or "I think I'll wear this invisible shirt today". It just ain't gonna make any difference with that many people who are rightly treating the virtual reality as virtual, and are there to have some fun. Of course they wouldn't do those types of things in real life, but this isn't real life, is it? It's a game!

So tonight I had a choice... 2,000 words for NaNoWriMo tonight... or find the last Stray Beads in Okami. After a couple moments of deep thought, I picked the right choice! I collected the last Stray Beads and tacked 2,000 words onto tomorrow's (today's) 2,000 words! Lemme tell you... If you decide to hunt the beads, even if you use a location guide, be prepared for some pretty intense fights and maneuvering and some might fine-tuned brush strokes. And racing. I hate racing. Why are there so many races in these types of games?!

So... Tay asked, in short, what makes Okami an excellent game. Well, I wrote a sort of review a long time ago, but that's a bit long, so, hmm... Well, if you're like me, you buy games with wolves in it, and anything else that comes in the package is just a bonus. But... I'm going to assume that's not going to be high on the list of reasons to get it, soooooooo...

I'm going to have to say, if I can only pick one thing, that the Celestial Brush is what makes Okami an excellent game. Pretty much push a trigger button, the world kinda tips back, freezes in time, and turns into a canvas, and you can draw basic shapes on it to fire off different moves. There are 13 primary brush techniques, each with some sub-variant that you have to unlock by finding the side quest. You literally use the brush for everything. Exploration, interacting with characters, combat... It's just reeeally neat. It's what sets Okami apart from any other game out there.

Second, it's a huge world, with a huge storyline, with so many side quests that you lose track and/or can't find them all the first time through. Just when you think the game's getting close to the end, it doesn't end... And it keeps wrapping up, but not ending, that you just kind of give up guessing when it's going to end, until that moment where it's suddenly very clear that it's ending soon! Let's see... I have about 80 clocked hours in the game, but I've run through it almost twice now. So 40 hours going through the first time, and then snagging New Game +, which starts you off with all of your items (not the brush techniques), so the game itself was a lot easier, but I went and did a bunch of the side quests, and just hit 40 hours again. So, if you're like me, where you buy a game that advertises a certain amount of play time, and you blow through it in a third of the time... This is for you!

Without the Celestial Brush, Okami turns out to follow Zelda, as far as gameplay goes. Sort of... action/adventure with a bit of RPG elements. You start out weakened, follow the storyline, kill some baddies, get stronger, upgrade your stats and weapons... There are some obvious puzzle quests, and a whole crate-load of moments where you have to use your brain to figure out how to get through an area with your limited brush techniques. If you're not big on fighting, you're in luck, since the combat is usually pretty quick and straightforward. (Unless you start hunting the Stray Beads.) The roaming bad guys are shown as different colored scrolls that float around while you explore. Sometimes they'll chase you, but most of the time you can avoid them, and there's an artifact you can buy to ward them off. Whenever you do fight, though, you can buy all sorts of overpowering power-ups that'll make battles excessively easy if you stock up. (Like a scroll that makes you immune to all attacks for around 5 minutes, sheesh.)

So, in a nut-shell (but... probably too late to fit in the shell), Okami is a Zelda-type game with a Celestial Brush that takes the genre to an entirely new level. If you don't like Zelda-type games, though, you probably won't find Okami any better. Pretty much the same thing... Running around a big world, doing quests, building up your strength to fight the final boss.

Plus... You get to play a sun goddess in the form of a wolf! I'd like to see anyone top that! Bwahaha... Oh, and did I mention the stellar storyline and dialogue and characters? (It can be sad, too... Man, I'm at a certain part, right now. I know exactly what comes next and I don't want to proceed.) And the really cool peek into Japanese mythology. (As far as I can tell, every character is straight out of mythology. All I know is that Wikipedia had a trove of links all crisscrossing around, listing mythological people that recognized from the game.) If you're into that sort of thing... I enjoy mythology and fantasy.

So, uhm, there's... a lot more than a short and sweet explanation. I say you should at least try it! (It's going to come out on the Wii in spring, too! You can try it twice! Celestial Brush with the Wii Remote... I'll never shut off my TV again.)

Hey, Chronicshank, even though you'll probably never read this (although there is a chance, because I used to have a page up of a sort of Warcraft hitlist where I listed some people and I was getting hits from Google searching those names), I'm going to write this post to you. If anything, you'll serve as an example to everyone else!

I was leveling Kittari today. A 52 Druid... about halfway to 53. Rested experience, for the win! I could get to 54 in a day if I wanted. I was poking around Western Plaguelands, testing the waters for the quest levels. I was doing pretty good... That is, until I started seeing extra numbers popping up on my combat window. Lots of numbers. "That's an awful lot of output for a druid fighting a ghoul," I say to myself. There was a mage next to me, but he wasn't fighting at the time. Then I go, "ohh, look! there's an undead rogue behind this ghoul!" So I take the time to flee out of range while I determined your strength. Ouch. A 56 rogue. 4 levels above me, geez. Might as well kiss my druid kitty tail goodbye, right? Well, hold on... You attacked the mage! Alliance treaties dictate that all Alliance members should aid each other in time of need... So I rush to the aid of the mage... And we both completely overpower you in a matter of seconds and you die. Hooray! Disaster averted! Mage runs away and I never see him again. But then I see a passing 54 Alliance rogue. "Lovely!" I think. "Now I have some backup in case that rogue comes back!"

Well, come back you did... This time you resorted to killing us off with single blows in the middle of combating a mob. That is some really high Horde class right there. I don't mind PvP in the least bit, but sniping someone after a battle with an NPC is pretty low, even for an undead rogue. Maybe you were just angry and needed to kill someone. I understand that, because I do it all the time, myself. I get killed by someone who totally pwns me, and I go munch a nearby lowbie for revenge. But you didn't stop there. Which is also admirable! But you kept one-shotting everyone from the shadows while they were fighting NPCs. That is not so admirable.

A few of us got on the Local Defense channel to discuss the situation. General response: "Warning, lame-butt rogue in Sorrow Hill. 56, but must attack weak players. Will lose one on one." I must say that such a response was accurate. Not only did you keep killing me over and over while I was a) fighting a mob or b) healing after a resurrection, but when I actually decided to fight back, I murdered you. You stood absolutely no chance. Me! A 52 druid! Killing a 56 rogue! Such an impossibility is, in fact, quite possible after all! It was easy enough, in fact, that the first time, I thought you were merely 54. But the second time I killed you, one on one, with fresh health, I saw that, yes! You were 56. Such elation! Not only was a druid killing a rogue, but it was a 52 druid killing a 56 rogue!

Anyway, I just wanted to brag.

Well, except for that one time after I killed the rogue the first time and some doped up Troll mage with such a high level that he was ?? to me and a water elemental got me while I was fighting. Honestly. I'm very nearly convinced that all horde kill people in two ways. First is when their targets are so far below them, they're gray, meaning they give no honor. (As was the case with this mage. If it was ?? to me, then I was gray to him.) Second is killing a clearly superior enemy while he's already fighting. Either way is honorless, and if that's what it takes to make the Horde the most PvP-capable half of the game, then so be it. An honorless war-faring faction! Hey! At least you're living up to the roleplaying aspect of the realm, eh?

Of course, I'm going to defend Valve, because I don't know their personality very well and I've never seen them lay the smackdown to internet gripes like Bungie can do... So I thought I'd try.

The complaint hitting the internet today is the fact that some people are having their Orange Box installations deactivated. Why? Well, it's because they found some awesome deal from a country across the world, imported the game, and then installed it. Now... I know people do this with PC games sometimes, but isn't this illegal? It shouldn't be illegal, no, but it doesn't change the fact that it is. Take a look at region locked DVDs and console games. They're locked because of all the country's different laws, right? One country has a slightly different law than in the United States, and you're going to have to release the game in that country differently, perhaps with a different price to cover working within those laws.

Well, these people bought their Orange Box from, say, Thailand, for 20 bucks. (Thailand for 20 bucks? If that doesn't throw up red flags right now, you're insane.) I'm sure that after the export/import fees, it's going to be around $40 like it would be if you bought it via Steam or in the United States, but that's beside the point, I guess. They said the store they bought the game from is legitimate and they were going to do it despite a few warnings from people.

They get their keys... They install their games... They play and... Games deactivated. Woah! Big surprise! Apparently, Valve says they're playing a game from one country on an account in another and it's a no-no. Gamers are, of course, in a major outrage and overreacting by stating that they'll never purchase a game from Valve again. Well, your loss, buddy!

Now, many people are getting refunds by the stores they got their international keys from and buying US boxes, and they're still having some difficulties. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is because they haven't properly cleared their Steam installation. As everyone knows, it's a wonderful service, but sometimes it just needs cleaned. In everyone's heightened state of insanity, they're blaming every little problem on Valve and not using a little bit of common sense.

I don't know... It just seems to me that if you're going to go buy a release of the game you want from another country because it's cheaper after all the currency exchange, one of the things you're naturally going to have to worry about with Steam is buying a game from another region and then activating that number on another region entirely. That just reeks of irresponsibility. You might have been used to doing something like this on games without Steam, because hey, it's a global economy, right? I can buy whatever I want from wherever I want! Well, yes, I'll be the first to agree that you should be able to, but also the first to notice that it's not. What happens when you buy an NTSC format DVD from another region and try to play it here? It doesn't work, does it? Not unless you crack the DVD player. Believe it or not, that's not to inconvenience you/ Piracy countermeasures do inconvenience everyone, yes, but region locking isn't a piracy countermeasure... It's so the publishers can actually release the DVD in the country of the region number, because they have different laws. It's complicated, and I probably don't even know exactly why they have regions, but that's what I've always thought and seen.

Moral of the story: Valve is NOT evil, they will NOT randomly lock your games because they know that's a bad thing to do. But they WILL lock your games if you've done something odd like buy an illegal key from another region and Digg can scream "bloody murder!!" about it all they want. They're just a bunch of sensitive little gamers who take offense at every tiny mishap. (Remember the Halo 3 resolution debacle? Haha, honestly, the uproar over a few missing lines of resolution. Ah, the level of intellect you get when you mash a bunch of angry techs together on a tech news site.) Even when Valve is doing everything they can do to fix it. (Basically, it's your own fault and the fault of who you bought the game from. Since you didn't buy it from Valve/Steam directly, it's not their problem. It's their game, but see, they would have sold it to you properly.)

Game Consumer Rule #1: Buy games from your own country, noob.

With the latest World of Warcraft patch to 2.2.0, everyone was surprised (some, like me, pleasantly surprised) to see that Blizzard had decided to completely rework the audio engine for the game! Now, instead of hardware acceleration, they're using FModEX to provide a new software-level engine.

This, of course, reached the ears of Creative Labs. According to a very biased article at a place called WoWInsider.com (I mean, look: "So it seems Blizzard treats other hardware vendors the same way they treat their own players..." What's that supposed to mean? You think Blizzard treats their players poorly? Well, 8 million subscribers say you're entirely wrong, my friend.)... Creative had very little advanced warning in the matter (as if Creative thinks they need to be told about something like this) and they're hopping mad, trying to incite all the Creative sound card owners to riot against Blizzard for daring to do such a thing! (Okay, maybe not riot, but they're still trying to get players to speak out.)

As a not so proud owner of an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook sound card, I can honestly say that I think Blizzard is doing the best thing they could've done. Vista has been out for what, almost a year now, and Creative's drivers are still the horribly stripped drivers they are. You can barely get the microphone working. I was okay with some drivers acting up when Vista was released, but this is 12 months later, people. Everyone else has flawlessly working drivers... Everyone except Creative, who has been known to drag their feet on drivers. Now, they're complaining that Blizzard didn't consult them when Blizzard decided to rework the game engine in Blizzard's own game. Creative thinks they need to be consulted before anyone touches their sound card engines. Hmm...

Basically, it's this... FMod is new to Blizzard and there are some bugs, naturally. These bugs aren't huge, but they're annoying to some people. So far, the major issue is that the channels of sound have been cut down for the time being, so people are noticing some sounds cutting out when they're in an area with lots of sounds. Somehow, this is worth getting angry over. There are some other issues, sure, but Blizzard is trying to answer, correct and update any and all problems.

Some short-sighted players are asking why in the heck Blizzard decided to strip out a perfectly working engine for one that doesn't work anymore. To which Blizzard replied: "Understand that we have the source to all parts of our sound engine now, and will be working with the developer to continue to find improvements, a handful of which were checked in here just today for an upcoming patch (probably not the first patch to 2.2.0 as that one is already in mid testing, but very likely the one after that)."

Meaning, the engine they used to use did NOT give them access to all source code for it. Meaning what, exactly? Well... Clearly they couldn't do what they wanted to do, so they thought it was cost-effective enough to start using a NEW engine. One that they can change to their heart's desire... One that they can fix, by themselves, all the issues they may or may not run into! So, wait... What's this? Blizzard is trying to do something GOOD in the long run?

This is what humanity doesn't get... patience. Good things come to those who wait, but most people want everything RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW! They complain when games are delayed, they complain when games are released with bugs, they complain the bug fixes are delayed, they complain about other bugs when old bugs are fixed. This new sound engine is for the better. Even now, on Vista, the OS that doesn't allow hardware acceleration because Creative hasn't bothered to fix that for Audigy cards, I've noticed a positive difference.

But, in short, only Creative sound cards are broken... Hmm. What does that mean? Does it mean that Blizzard is an idiot for changing sound card engines and breaking Creative cards, or possibly... just maybe... it means that Creative's drivers are crappy and don't work with software that other cards have no problem with? Hmm.

Think of it this way. If, say, a web browser decided to interpret things on it's own, disregarding what other browsers handle the same way, and you expect everyone else to cater to your programming anomalies... What would you, as a web programmer, do? Would you program for the web browser that interprets things non-standard, or would you program for the browsers that display pages properly and in a predictable and standard way? Hmm... I think I recall a massive amount of people NOT wanting to cater to Internet Explorer for this very reason.

But it's bad that Blizzard is inconveniencing you in the present, in an effort to make things perfect in the future, for this very reason? That Creative isn't good enough to just make their cards work? Kinda got some raging double-standards there, if you ask me.

I enjoy Creative. They're good cards. I'll probably buy Creative cards in the future. The drivers? Not so good... They'll get fixed, sure, but not very quickly at all. For those of you with Creative cards, don't bug Blizzard... Do what Creative is asking you and apply that force to CREATIVE. Make them fix their drivers! They have plenty of money... I think they can handle churning drivers as stable and as quickly as nVidia can.